President Vladimir Putin today said Russia would allow athletes to compete at the 2018 Winter Olympics under a neutral flag, after the country was banned from the Games over a state-orchestrated doping programme.

There had been speculation Moscow could boycott the Games entirely after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) today barred the country from competition over what its chief Thomas Bach described as Russia's "unprecedented attack on the integrity of the Olympic Games and sport".

Clean Russian athletes would be allowed to compete under an Olympic flag, the IOC said.

"We will certainly not declare any boycott, we will not prevent our Olympians from competing, if they want to take part in a personal capacity," Putin said after a speech at an automobile plant in Nizhny Novgorod, in which he announced he would run for a fourth presidential term next year.

"The final decision of course must be made by the Olympic team," he said.

Putin said the ban looked like "an absolutely staged and politically motivated decision", repeating denials that any state sponsored doping programme had existed in Russia.

"I feel for those guys -- I consider many of them friends rather than just acquaintances. I really feel for them," he said of the athletes in the Russian team.

Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, writing on his Telegram social networking page, warned that "not one athlete living in Chechnya will participate under a neutral flag."

Olympic gold-medallist gymnast Svetlana Khorkina, now a ruling party MP, told Sport Express: "What have we come to? Crushing our great country Russia? No, they won't manage it. Russia has an army, nuclear weapons and great people."

Pro-Kremlin media focused on discrediting Grigory Rodchenkov, the whistleblower who gave evidence of a state- controlled doping programme in which he played a central role.

Rodchenkov has been living in hiding in the United States since lifting the lid on the intricate workings of a state- supported doping scheme at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

It said the IOC's actions proved that "you can destroy a whole Olympic country on the basis of indirect evidence and a single witness who was under a criminal investigation and has been treated in a psychiatric hospital".

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